Brittany Jones: Waffle Lamp - "Comet"

Concept

As a school spirited UT Dallas graduate student, I wanted to incorporate the university's outer space theme into one of my projects. Since we're the "Comets" and comets emit light, I thought it would fit well with the waffle lamp project. I browsed Pinterest and Google images for comets and waffle lamps to become more familiar with the fabricated models out there. Then I drew a quick sketch.


Modeling Techniques
In Rhino, I combined a Nurbs sphere and a truncated cone to create the base shape. Then I copied the sphere and scaled it down inside the first sphere. I used the Boolean difference to carve out the center of the comet. For the comet trail, I used the cage editing tool to scale down the middle section of the cone to create a curve. After that I copied the cone shape and scaled it down inside the first cone. Then I used the Boolean difference to carve out the inside of the comet trail. For the notch details of the tail along the sides of the radial slices, I drew a handle curve and extruded it to create a poly surface. Then I modeled four cubes and a couple cylinders for the light bulb holder. I scaled one cylinder smaller than the other and used the Boolean difference to create a 1 inch hole. I copied the piece and moved it to the opposite side of the sphere to create two options for the light bulb placement.

For the contouring process I first contoured the Z axis. Then I created a bounding box and went to my top view to create a radial section for the X axis. After that I went through the process of cutting my ribs. The material thickness and cylinder thickness was 0.12. Then I used the massive unroll script to lay out my contours for slicing.

Materials
I used brown hardboard for the physical material of the Comet lamp. For the light bulb, I chose to get a flickering orange flame to emulate the fire of a comet. Due to the optional light bulb placements and form, the lamp can also be hung upside down.